We’re off on a three week driving holiday around California. We intend to fly to Los Angeles, pick up a car and then drive south to Anaheim spending a couple of days there to do the Disney parks, back up to LA for Hollywood then following the Pacific Coast Highway north through Santa Monica, Malibu, Santa Barbara, Monterey to San Francisco. From there it’s west through the Yosemite National Park, across the Sierra Nevada and south through Death Valley until we reach Las Vegas. Across to the Grand Canyon and then south across the Mojave Desert, the Joshua Tree National Park eventually ending up in San Diego for Sea World and finally back along the coast to Los Angeles and home.
Emma’s bringing a friend along to keep her company as she’s almost 14 now and it will make the holiday that much more enjoyable for her if she has someone she can relate to. So she’s decided to bring this 29 year old man with her….. No, she hasn’t really…… She’s bringing one of her school friends, Sophia, who just happens to live not far away in Yalding.
Sophia’s dad drove us to Heathrow to catch the 12.05 pm flight to Los Angeles and we arrived at 09.30 am so that we had plenty of time to relax and more importantly for Emma and Sophia, time to look around the duty free shops.
The airport was crammed with people and we hung around waiting for the information boards to tell us when to check in. We’ve had to push ourselves through queues and queues of people since entering the departure check-in area in order to find a quiet place to wait but soon after we found it the information board told us our flight was checking in. Pushing ourselves back through the queues and queues of people to reach the check-in desk we suddenly realised that the queues and queues of people are queues and queues of people waiting to check in for our flight so we turned around and pushed back through the queues and queues of people in order to try and find the end of the queue of the queues and queues of people so we could queue with the queues and queues of people for the flight that they were all queuing for.
We had to queue and queue with the queues and queues of people for an unbelievable one and a half hours between 10.00 am and 11.30 am and we were still queuing when they announced the flight was boarding. Pauline was getting more and more annoyed but when we reached the check-in desk she was remarkably restrained. The woman at the desk said it unfortunately seemed to be a perfectly normal situation for a Saturday and there was nothing much that could be done about it. I must admit I couldn’t see why it should take this long to check everybody in on a Saturday and not on any other day of the week. The plane holds the same number of passengers regardless of the day of the week doesn’t it?
We took off at 12.35 pm, Billy Elliot was the in-flight movie and we landed at 11.15 pm our time, 2.15 pm local time.
Our car was already booked for the three weeks so out we went to the Hertz shuttle bus for a short drive over to the Hertz car pick up centre. The man at the desk took our details and proceeded to identify an available car for us. While he was tapping away on his keyboard Pauline suddenly confused him by saying, “I’m sorry but I can’t have a white one, I’ve had a couple of nasty accidents in white cars and I just don’t want white.”
The man looked up, smiled indulgently at her and kept tapping away. Finally he said, “I’m having trouble getting your car at the moment. We’re so busy a lot of vehicles aren’t ready yet.” Then he said, “Your vehicle isn’t available but I can let you have a similar vehicle in the same group or I can upgrade you to an MPV People Carrier if you like.” Pauline didn’t want the MPV. She was concerned that our luggage would not be locked out of sight in a car boot but would be in full view in the back of the MPV during the many stop offs we had planned over the next three weeks. In the end we agreed to take a similar vehicle in the same group.
“OK,” said the man, “Go outside and I’ll drive it over for you. Before I do, where ya headin’ for?” We said we had to get to Anaheim and the Disney Parks.
He said, “No problem, I’ll just show ya on this map here,” and he laid a small map on the counter and started to scribble on it saying, “Now this here is the Hertz compound where you are now, the exit is on the south side over in the corner. When you exit take a left and take a right at the third set of lights on to 101 east, take the 5 south exit to Disneyway, second set of lights west on Harbour Road and then east on South Manchester Way.”
I stood in front of him, looking at his map, grunting and nodding furiously. I was still trying to figure out how to get out of the Hertz compound when he stopped talking and said, “OK?”
“Yep-yep. Yep-yep-yep,” I said, glancing across at Pauline and hoping she’d been listening and managed to get the instructions in her head because I hadn’t a bloody clue what he’d said. “See you outside,” he said and walked off.
As we went outside I said to Pauline, “How do we get out of the Hertz compound?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said.
Outside we joined Emma and Sophia who had been waiting with all our luggage and eventually our car drove up. The man opened the boot and it was immediately apparent that our two large suitcases and two medium suitcases were not going to fit. The car itself was quite spacious but the boot was relatively small. “Our luggage will never fit in there. This car group is supposed to be able to take two large and three medium suitcases, what are we going to do now?” said Pauline. The man looked a bit harassed, his pleasant cheerful veneer was beginning to wear thin. “Look, I’ve got to go,” he said, “come back inside and I’ll hand you over to Customer Services and they’ll upgrade you, follow me.”
Back inside, the Customer Services man started to try and find us a bigger car. Tapping away at his computer he finally said, “Well how about an MPV?”
Pauline was still worried about the luggage in the back. “It comes with tinted windows if that helps,” said the man. Pauline was still not sure.
“I’m sure it will be all right,” I said, “the car will be locked and alarmed and we can always cover the cases with something if you’re worried.” Pauline finally accepted the situation, the man finalised the paperwork and just as I was about to sign the form Pauline suddenly shouted, “Oh, its not white is it? Is it white? I don’t want a white one. I just can’t have a white car. I’m sorry but I can’t.”
The Customer Services man put his pen down very slowly and carefully and looked over at me. I looked back with a silly embarrassed grin and a shrug of my shoulders while he said in an extremely slow determined voice stressing every syllable, “I don’t know if it’s white.” “Does it matter that much? I asked Pauline. “Yes it does,” she said looking really upset, “it can’t be white, it really can’t.”
“It’s in bay M4, you’ll have to go see it,” said the man. So off Pauline went leaving me standing rather sheepishly in front of the counter trying to engage the man in friendly small talk while we waited to see if the car was white or not.
“I dunno eh? Women eh? What can you do eh? It’s all beyond me,” I kept saying.
Finally Pauline came back and told us that it was OK the car was silver. The Customer Services man took a deep breath and rather hesitantly asked if he could print out the final piece of documentation or whether there was anything else we needed to check. “No, everything’s OK now,” we said.
“OK, there you go, the keys are in the car.”
Back outside the two girls were fed up and wondering where the hell we’d been. It had taken two hours to sort the car out and it was now coming up to 5 pm..
With Pauline map reading we followed the route pretty well. We’d already booked the motel while back in England so we had the address and knew that it was only a block or two from the Disney parks. If we could find Disney we could find the motel from there. We were making good time and then within spitting distance of where we thought the motel should be, I took a wrong turn, realised it but couldn’t turn round and get back on the same road as it was five lanes on each side with barriers all the way down the middle so left turns were impossible.
I didn’t want to take a right turn as I didn’t feel confident enough to find my way back onto the other side of the road again and didn’t want to get lost even more, so I carried on driving. Eventually the barriers in the middle of the road disappeared and left turns were possible.
“OK,” I said, “I’ll turn left here, go down that road over there, turn round and rejoin this carriageway back in the right direction.”
I turned left and saw a very dilapidated motel, a bit like the one in “Psycho” but without the big creepy house on the hill with the shadow of Anthony Perkin’s mother in the top window. Turning into a parking area behind the motel I stopped while Pauline had a look at the map.
As I glanced up and out of the windscreen I realised that we’d stopped in a very sleazy looking car park and just in front of us were half a dozen or so dodgy looking Hispanic youths. Two were washing a very old car while the rest were just hanging around looking menacing and obviously just waiting for an Englishman in a rental car to pull in looking lost. It was the quickest three point turn I’ve ever done and we were back on the highway again.
Still lost, we stopped at a florists, asked directions and were told that we were nowhere near where we wanted to be and that since our map had been published they had built a new road.
Great.
Turning round yet again and after driving and still not finding any meaningful street names I finally said, “I think we need to turn around again, I’ll just pull in over here.” Turning left I pulled into a car parking area behind a tacky looking building, stopped the car and…………….. you’ve already guessed haven’t you?…………. it was only the same bloody motel car park we’d escaped from earlier.
And yes, there they were, still washing the car and still standing around but now staring at this mad person in a car who for some inexplicable reason kept using their car park to practise three point turns at 40 mph!
During all this we came to realise that it hadn’t helped matters because we’d been incorrectly reading the way the roads were signed. In the US, whenever a road crossed another, the name of the road that crosses in front of you is hanging over the roadway facing you as you drive. We thought it meant that if you wanted that road you stayed in the lane that the sign was over and kept going. That explained a lot of missed turnings but it’s all right now, we’ve got it.
It was starting to get dark and I was beginning to get worried, This was my first few hours of driving in the US and driving in the dark was the last thing I wanted to do. I needn’t have worried though. We stumbled onto the motel after Sophia suddenly shouted, “Isn’t that our motel over there?” as I cruised blithely along a freeway in the opposite direction yet again. Emma suddenly shouted, “Go down there dad, you’re going on to the wrong road.”
“Keep it in sight and I’ll turn around,” I shouted, “don’t let it disappear whatever you do.”
We got there at last and checked in to ‘The Penny Sleeper Motel’. Motels are hired by the room and two adults and two children share the one room. Two double beds are provided plus bathroom, shower etc. We’ve booked three nights here in order to spend Sunday and Monday at the Disney parks before moving on and by the time I’d spent driving around half of the Los Angeles suburbs we didn’t get to bed until 22.15.
In real time we’d been up for around 24 hours and we had to be up at 08.00 the next morning to make the most of our day at Disney.
Then to round everything off we realised that the clocks had to go forward one hour.
…………….Blimey!
